In his magisterial study, The Slave Ship,
maritime historian Marcus Rediker has documented
the role played by emotional and especially
visual appeals in ending the trans-Atlantic slave
trade. Not unlike the structural violence endemic
to global capitalism today, the abolitionist
James Field Stanfield argued that the terrible
truths of the slave trade "had been withheld from
the public eye by every effort that interest,
ingenuity, and influence, could devise" (Rediker, 2007, p. 133).
Therefore, "Stanfield appealed to the immediate,
visceral experience of the slave ship, over and
against abstract knowledge about the slave trade,
as decisive to abolition ..." (p. 156). The
abolitionist's most potent weapon was the
dissemination of drawings of the slave ship
Brooks. Rediker asserts that these images were
"to be among the most effective propaganda any
social movement has ever created" (p. 308).
Based on recent findings from neuroscience we can
plausibly deduce that the mirror neurons of the
viewer were engaged by these images of others
suffering. The appeal was to the public's
awakened sense of compassion and revulsion toward
graphic depictions of the wholesale violence,
barbarity, and torture routinely practiced on
these Atlantic voyages. Rediker notes that the
images would instantaneously "make the viewer
identify and sympathize with the âinjured
Africans' on the lower deck of the ship ..."
while also producing a sense of moral outrage (p. 315, Olson, 2008).
In our own day, the nonprofit Edge Foundation
recently asked some of the world's most eminent
scientists, "What are you optimistic about? Why?"
In response, the prominent neuroscientist Marco
Iacoboni cited the proliferating experimental
work into the neural mechanisms that reveal how
humans are "wired for empathy." This is the
aforementioned discovery of the mirror neuron
system or MNS. The work shows that the same
affective brain circuits are automatically
mobilized upon feeling one's own pain and the pain of others.
Iacoboni's optimism is grounded in his belief
that with the popularization of scientific
insights, these findings in neuroscience will
seep into public awareness and " ... this
explicit level of understanding of our empathic
nature will at some point dissolve the massive
belief systems that dominate our societies and
that threaten to destroy us" (Iacoboni, 2007, p.
14). Whether or not this occurs, Iacoboni's
prediction underscores the complex relationship
between science and culture and social historian
Margaret Jacob's insight that "No institution is
safe if people simply stop believing in the
assumptions that justify its existence" (Jacoby,
1987, p.). Iacoboni's recent book, Mirroring
People (2008a) and interviews (2008b) as well as
Rizzolati and Sinigaglia's Mirrors in the Brain
(2008) promise to make this new work accessible
to the lay public. In similar fashion, Steven
Pinker concludes a recent piece on the science of
morality with these challenging but hopeful words
from Anton Chekov, "Man will become better when
you show him what he is like" (Pinker, 2008). [...]
<http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/16246>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2008/07/we-empathize-therefore-we-are-toward.htm>monochrom
at 7/26/2008 07:25:00 PM
